John the road manager had a molded golden eighth-note that dangled from a chain around his neck. A bit cranky Out of the elevator, take a left, first door on the right. John held the door open. Tom Waits was piled up on the chair next to the bathroom door and a couple of the guys in the band were on the couch. It was sometime after one. Waits had just played two shows in front of two half-empty houses and he had to pull his fingers out of the ropy lengths of his hair to shake hands.
Then he headed for the bathroom. While Waits was out of the room and my photographer friend Tim was retrieving the tape recorder I'd left in the car, I took inventory of the pile of stuff that Waits had dumped in front of his chair. There were matchbooks and a couple of packs of cigarettes, an obscure brand, smaller than most, called Elegados.
Phone numbers with and without names scrawled on scraps of paper. Half-buried beneath was a silver-scaled hip-flask, the kind with curved sides to hide the bulge. It was all great material to toss in to a story about Tom Waits, and listing it helped keep me from dozing off to the lull of the musicians' voices from the couch.
I hadn't been getting all that much sleep lately myself, and it was beginning to tell. I felt slow. Earlier that day, I'd gotten a message from a woman, a photographer who wanted to do some photos of Tom Waits. I called to see what exactly she wanted. I told her I'd see how Waits was, and if he really wanted his picture taken, I'd give her a call back.
Waits came back into the room, sat down and pulled off his shirt. His face was younger than any of his photos seemed to reveal; he was obviously tired and restless and none too thrilled with the prospect of answering some guy's questions while another guy stared at him through a lens. Anybody could have felt it. Can't do that, though. You've hung on this long, gone this far, so you might as well try to get him to open up, give you enough quotes to throw a story together, and get out of here.
